FOMC Minutes: Empire Striking Back; Not So Confident Anymore; Next Move a Negative Funds Rate?

It took a while for this contingent of FOMC members to reach the conclusion that in this economy the dollar matters. With housing on the upswing but not swinging up enough to pull overall growth sufficiently higher, there seems little reason for the Fed to passively accept “potential downside risks resulting from foreign economic and financial developments” by, in effect, allowing the dollar to continue to rise – “the value of the dollar had increased significantly since the middle of la...